Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday February 10, 2010 @04:10PM
from the great-schwag-bazaar-in-the-sky dept.

itwbennett writes "Once the largest telecom show in the United States, and arguably the world, SUPERCOMM has been shelved for financial reasons, the Telecommunications Industry Association announced yesterday. Blogger Tom Henderson speculates that the new emphasis on mobility rather than the landline infrastructure is partly to blame. (The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and CTIA Wireless are the beneficiaries of this shift.) But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"

Spring was never waiting for us, girl,It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance.

Between the parted pages and were pressedin love' hot, fevered iron like a stripe'd pair of pants.

MacArthur's park is melting in the darkAll the sweet green icing flowing downSomeone left the cake out in the rain.I don't think that I can take it'Cause it took so long to bake itAnd Ill never have that recipe again!Oh, no-o-o-o!

I recall the yellow cotton dressFlowing like a wave on the ground around your knees.

Very true. I am a telephony engineer, specializing in call centers.
I was at VoiceCon, a multi-vendor show, in SF in December; it was a joke. There were very few vendors there and attendance was very low despite/giving/ away passes.
(Note: the VoiceCon in Orlando is still pretty good though.)
Avaya, Cisco, Genesys (which are the big vendors I mostly work with) each have their own show. Cisco doesn't even show up at VoiceCon shows anymore.
SuperComm is a bit different from the world I work in but the poi

was it an actual telephone conference, or was it using computers? Because I'm trying to imagine the logistics of 5000 attendees and someone wants to say something. Hell, even if no one wants to say anything, enough people with sensitive phones is going to crowd the line if they don't mute the phone.

It was done via the web, with bits of java. I can't remember who actually was responsible for the programming, but it was pretty slick.

You were basically placed in a virtual main hall, where you could then choose which sessions you wanted to attend. In each presentation, you looked at what you would normally see in a conference sesion - a slideshow-type presentation. There were no interruptions during the presentations, but after each session, there was a Q&A period where you could use either your ke

That's pretty damn awesome. Best I've seen is these cheezy little "webinars," where you've got maybe 100 people tops all watching a feed. Even then it wasn't exactly what I'd call "well handled" when it came time to ask questions and such.

Please overpay more for your home phones, mobile phones and Internet so we can resuming having our annual junkets. You can do this easily by failing to be clairvoyant about your future usage of our products and services. At the boy's club er we mean SUPERCOMM conference we've had disagreements on the detail of the propaganda err we mean exciting information we wish to brainwash you err we mean inform you about. So we have decided to part company - each of us will be having lots separate shows from now on. However more junkets er we mean trade shows means more money is needed, so expect all your charges to go up errr we mean expect new and exciting value added offerings in line with the current environmental conditions.

Signed,

Those turkeys that make moving between handsets or providers a time consuming ordeal from hell....err we mean your friendly phone communications providers.

Now pass the vintage scotch, and call my drug dealer and pimp, I'm having a party tonight!

But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"

I've found the largest reason for the decline is internet websites.

In ye olden days, if you wanted to learn about a new product, you had to go to a trade show, and get the hard sell from the salespeople. Now a days everything you'd ever want to know is in a downloadable PDF or on the website. If I want the hard sell, they've got sales phone numbers on the website.

COMDEX failed, not because they ran out of money per se, but because all the major players wanted to 'do their own thing' and just pulled out. However SUPERCOMM is failing because not enough people and/or corporations can afford to go.

Well, all those absolutes. Companies are not like college students with an empty wallet. The world wide marketing budget and world wide travel budget for all corporations has not declined to zero.

If trade shows were the most useful way to spend the marketing budget, and were also the most useful way to spend the R&D / purchasing budget, people on both sides would participate. But they're obsolete and replaced by websites, suprbowel commercials, facebook pages, spam, whatever 2.0, because those give m

Many vendors have alarmingly thin information about their products on their web site and in their brochures, unfortunately. Alarmingly thin as in doesn't answer some of the most basic questions any technical person would ask about the product.

In cases like these I can't decide whether the marketing people are lazy, ignorant, or incompetent.

The telcos had just as much opportunity to see internet and mobile communication coming as anybody else. More, really.

If they had invested the Federal (read, "taxpayer") money given to them to bring fiber to the home on that instead of squandering it on other things, plus a bit of their own money, then THEY would be the ones giving us all high-speed internet and VOIP now, instead of companies like Comcast and Time-Warner.

Indeed! The telcos have whined for years that the problem giving people high speed internet access was the "last mile". Suddenly, in the last 10 years, 22MB/s cable and DSL have shown up (i.e., the last mile is faster than ever). And in the last year, my connection dropped from 6MB/s to 5MB/s, at 60$ a month.

Yes, at enormous costs to the tax payer. Of course, my point was that cable and DSL use already existing infrastructure for the last mile, so their complaints have "always" (at least since the year 2000) been null and void. Now the same ISPs are complaining about a lack of bandwidth on their internal networks and border networks, when they have lowered the bandwidth they deliver to me, at the same price. If the last mile had been the bottleneck at 6MB/s, the last mile would continue to be the bottleneck

Yes, I understand. I know this is subjective, but while my data rate has continued to improve, and at least theoretically is pretty high, I am not convinced that I get the actual data rate that is advertised, or even that shown on the speed test sites. I don't know what kind of subtle trickery they might pull to do that, but still that is the way it has seemed to me.

But more to the point, the cable company has treated their internet service the way they have treated their cable television service. On the

Lee Dryburgh has been organising a great telecom conference called Ecomm for the last two years. It specifically excludes people pitching their products and only gives sponsors a speaking slot if they have something to say. http://ecomm.ec/ [ecomm.ec]

I was lucky enough to speak on the Amsterdam version. I had a 7.5 minute slot to tell my story on why all telecom marketing and product management is wrong and another slot on another day on why voip won't be free anytime soon. I thought the format worked great because of